News Category: Life at Grubhub

Voices of Grubhub: Fostering Customer Loyalty with Grubhub+

To showcase different perspectives and give an inside look into Grubhub, we’re spotlighting leaders across the organization. For this edition, we caught up with Launika Raykar, Vice President, Loyalty and Marketing.

Launika’s team is responsible for Grubhub’s loyalty program, Grubhub+, as well as our efforts to reach more merchants, drivers, campus administrators and corporate clients.

Tell us about your journey at Grubhub so far. 

I joined Grubhub in April 2022, and my mission was to build the best loyalty program that engages diners to order more and stay exclusive with Grubhub. When I started, our Grubhub+ membership base was small but growing. However, within a month of joining, Amazon came on board, and my first big project was launching our partnership with Amazon and Grubhub+. This was a massive cross-functional effort and the fastest-moving project I’ve ever been a part of. Since then, we’ve relaunched Grubhub+ and continued to grow with Amazon; having just announced last week that we’ve made Grubhub+ an ongoing benefit for Prime members and have enabled Grubhub ordering on Amazon.com and the Amazon Shopping app. 

In your opinion, what are some key factors driving customer loyalty in today’s market, and how do they align with Grubhub’s goals?

Customers today look for value, recognition, and exceptional service. At Grubhub, our loyalty program is designed to meet these needs. We’re focused on delivering tangible value, recognizing frequent customers, and providing elevated services to our top-tier members. This approach aligns with our goals of increasing retention and deepening customer engagement.

What are the key areas of focus for the loyalty team in 2024?

One of our key objectives is to improve the actual and perceived value of Grubhub, with Grubhub+ being a significant part of that. We’re focused on growing our Grubhub+ membership base and ensuring these members are active and engaged. Retention is a major goal for us, and our strategies are designed to keep customers ordering month over month.

Any upcoming projects or initiatives the Loyalty team is working on in the year ahead?

One exciting initiative is the launch of a priority delivery feature for Grubhub customers. With this feature, customers can upgrade to Priority Delivery at checkout to have their meal delivered faster than the standard Grubhub delivery time. And for Grubhub+ customers, we’re currently offering it at no additional cost. This feature will save our customers time while adding to the monetary savings Grubhub+ members already receive. It’s an investment in our members, showing them that we value their time as much as their money. We’re also focused on better merchandising our loyalty program, celebrating customer savings, and reminding them of their benefits to drive deeper engagement.

Let’s talk about Gold Days of Grubhub+. We saw the announcement in May. In case folks missed it, what are Gold Days of Grubhub+ and what should we all know about the campaign?

Gold Days of Grubhub+ is Grubhub’s member appreciation month where we give our most loyal diners exclusive freebies and savings on restaurant and convenience items. We held our first-ever Gold Days of Grubhub in October 2023, and earlier this month we announced the second one that is running from May 13 through June 9!

During the month-long event, Grubhub+ members will receive even more value with 20K+ deals from local favorites, on top of dozens of high-value offers from popular national restaurants and convenience stores such as McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Sweetgreen, Chipotle, Wendy’s, KFC, Dunkin’, Pizza Hut, Popeyes and 7-Eleven. 

How does the loyalty team at Grubhub collaborate with other departments?

At Grubhub, everyone touches loyalty in some way. While there are people focused specifically on loyalty within my team, we work closely with almost every department. For example, our product and engineering teams focus on member insights, experience and customer retention, while our brand and marketing team works on raising program awareness and deepening member engagement. We also collaborate with analytics, PR, legal, and merchant network teams to ensure our strategy is integrated in broader decision making. This integrated approach ensures that loyalty is a priority across the entire business and that we make progress in a material way.

How do you as a leader foster a dynamic and collaborative culture within the Loyalty team?

I emphasize the three E’s: envisioning what’s possible, energizing the team to achieve this vision, and helping develop frameworks so the team can successfully execute. Creating an energized, high-tempo team environment is crucial. We hold regular team meetings and working sessions to ensure collaboration and cross-functional engagement, given that everyone has a role to play in loyalty. 

Voices of Grubhub: How Legal Supports Grubhub’s Business Strategy

To showcase different perspectives and give an inside look into Grubhub, we’re spotlighting leaders across the organization. For this edition, we caught up with Katie Armistead, Vice President of Legal & Deputy General Counsel.

The legal department serves as a critical business partner, helping enable the success of Grubhub’s strategy at every level of the organization. 

You have some tenure here at Grubhub. What was your trajectory like after law school?

Backing up a bit, I went to law school out East and made my way to the Midwest after graduating. My first job out of school was at Jones Day, a large international law firm. I spent three and a half years there before I moved in-house and joined Grubhub. My seven year anniversary was last week! And it’s funny, I’ve been here seven years and I feel like I’m at a new company every six months since there’s always a new initiative that’s important to Grubhub or a new legal risk which makes this job so fun yet challenging. My team is always having to stay up to date on business initiatives and what’s happening in the industry which keeps us constantly learning and evolving as legal professionals.

There’s a common misconception that legal teams can be a blocker to great ideas. How do you fight off that perception?

We consider ourselves real business partners and are here to support whatever the business needs. That’s been true since day one when we were a small but mighty team to today where we are a much larger function. Generally speaking, the legal team at companies can often get a bad reputation and is viewed as the “no” team more often than not. That’s not our goal or the team we want to be. I make sure that my team is part of every conversation from day one so that we can identify risks early on while learning about the opportunities an effort presents. 

It’s easy to call out what can go wrong, but identifying what can go right and help the business and our partners grow is equally important and something we place a lot of emphasis on. To do that, my team spends a lot of time building relationships with folks across the business to understand their priorities so we can best advise them and be viewed as a trusted partner.

The best analogy someone on my team said was that we are the pit team during a NASCAR race. When you’re watching NASCAR, you see the cars go around the track and then stop so that the pit team can come in and fix the car so it’s ready to race. That’s the legal team. We consider ourselves the pit team — we went to be helpers.  

Talk to me about work-life balance. As a lawyer and mom of two (almost three), how do you prioritize personal time and work and promote that within your team?

As a mom of a four-year-old and a two-year-old with another on the way, I have a lot going on in my life. Here’s my take: we all have other things that make us who we are outside of work, and when the team comes to work, we ask them to bring their full selves. We aren’t robots, so there’s no need to show up to work on Monday and immediately dive into contract negotiations. I want to hear about your weekend and the things you’ve been up to. Or, if you’ve been going through some challenges, I want you to know I’m here to support you. 

I’m a believer that a full personal life makes you a better lawyer, and I tell our lawyers that sometimes the best ideas I’ve had about our legal challenges have happened when I’m on a run or out to brunch with my girlfriends. 

What advice do you have for people who are pursuing a career in the legal field?

I hear a lot from more junior female attorneys and women in law school who want to know how they can get to where I’m at now. And I tell them all the same thing — work really hard and try to have some fun. The legal profession can be a lot of fun, but it has a bad reputation for being too hardworking or having too many naysayers which I mentioned earlier. You also need to work somewhere that aligns with your values.

One of the reasons I love Grubhub is because the people here are just so fabulous. Our leadership — specifically our chief legal officer, is an incredible leader and really champions junior lawyers. Loving the team you’re on makes coming to work every day fun and easy, and I would encourage people getting into the law profession to seek out law firms and companies that match their values and interests. You have to love what you do considering how much time you spend doing it.

You’re known within your team for having a lot of catchphrases. What are some of them?

Oh boy, there are a lot. Two of my favorites are “How many tacos did this cost us?” and “Lean into the chaos.”

 

Voices of Grubhub: Grubhub Corporate Accounts Continues to Set Industry Standard

To showcase different perspectives and give an inside look into Grubhub, we’re spotlighting leaders across the organization. For this edition, we caught up with Jeff Mirmelstein, Vice President of Corporate Accounts, to share some background on our corporate accounts function.

Building best-in-class products and services for campus and corporate clients is one of Grubhub’s focuses for the year. Our corporate accounts team partners with thousands of businesses across the country that use Grubhub to feed employees for company-wide lunches, team celebrations, virtual meetings, and everything in between.

The last few years have been interesting for the delivery industry, especially for corporate accounts. Tell us what the horizon has been like pre-COVID to post-COVID. 

COVID had an inverse impact on our team compared to the rest of Grubhub. Pre-COVID, most of our Corporate Accounts business was focused on in-office dining, including catering, scheduled team orders, or even late-night, weekend, and overtime meals. When people stopped going into offices, it was no surprise that our business initially declined. 

Interestingly, but also not surprisingly, COVID also presented a slew of different and unique use cases to serve clients and their employees in their homes, with things like team celebrations, webinars, virtual meetings, and virtual town halls. As people started to return to the office and we were able to leverage the use cases we built during COVID, our business rebounded and quickly returned to growth. While a large portion of our in-office business was paused in early 2020 due to Covid, we’ve more than rebounded. We’re now much larger than we were before the pandemic as we service clients’ in-office and at-home use cases.

Beyond COVID, you’ve seen the competitive landscape shift in corporate accounts as more players have entered the space. As a result, what has your team done differently? 

Over the last few years, we’ve seen new players aggressively enter the corporate accounts space. Our focus is always going to be solidifying Grubhub as the best meal perks provider for clients. It’s that simple. Companies need dedicated tools and services to meet their demands, and we’re constantly making updates and adding new features. We’ve increased our focus on Fortune 1000 companies and how we can be the best service provider to those large, sophisticated organizations. Our institutional knowledge of serving corporate accounts since 1999 has given us a significant advantage, so we know what they want and need to serve them best. 

Additionally, in the last few years, we’ve introduced a self-service product, allowing medium and small organizations to quickly sign up for a corporate account and start placing orders the same day. This frees up the enterprise team to spend more time building relationships with prospective clients and makes the onboarding process clearer and quicker for our SMB clients.

What are the key priorities your team is going after in 2024? 

Loyalty will continue to be a big one for us. We have our loyalty subscription program, Grubhub+, and we’re thinking through new ways about how it could be a complementary benefit for our Corporate clients.  

And as I mentioned earlier, we’re focused on maintaining our position as the platform of choice for businesses of all sizes. This includes large, complex accounts that require a more granular look into how their organization is spending, to a small, single-digit person office for their weekly lunches.

For more information on Grubhub Corporate Accounts, please visit here.